For the first time, scientists have deciphered the complete genetic instruction manuals of Canaanites. By comparing five Canaanite genomes with those of other ancient and modern populations, the researchers identified the Canaanites’ ancestors and discovered their descendants, modern Lebanese people.

Famous footprints of nearly 3.7-million-year-old hominids, found in 1976 at Tanzania’s Laetoli site, now have sizable new neighbors.

While excavating small pits in 2015 to evaluate the impact of a proposed field museum at Laetoli, researchers uncovered comparably ancient hominid footprints about 150 meters from the original discoveries. The new finds reveal a vast range of body sizes for...

Like lipstick on a collar, new DNA evidence is pointing to ancient affairs between bonobos and chimpanzees.

Chimps carry a small percentage of bonobo DNA, researchers report in the Oct. 28 Science. The conclusion comes from analysis of the genetic instruction books, or genomes, of 63 wild-born chimps, two captive chimps named Clint and Donald, and 10 wild-born bonobos. The apes came from...

VANCOUVER — Traces of long-lost human cousins may be hiding in modern people’s DNA, a new computer analysis suggests.

People from Melanesia, a region in the South Pacific encompassing Papua New Guinea and surrounding islands, may carry genetic evidence of a previously unknown extinct hominid species, Ryan Bohlender reported October 20 at the annual meeting of the American Society of...

One wave of ancient human migrants out of Africa gave rise to all non-Africans alive today, three separate genetic studies conclude.

Those human explorers left Africa about 50,000 to 72,000 years ago, mixed with Neandertals and spread across the world, researchers report online September 21 in Nature. The studies present data from genetically diverse and previously unrepresented...

Modern-day Melanesians carry a two-pronged genetic legacy of ancient interbreeding that still affects their health and well-being, researchers say.

Unlike people elsewhere in the world, these Pacific islanders possess nuclear DNA that they inherited from two Stone Age hominid populations, say population geneticist Benjamin Vernot, formerly of the University of Washington in Seattle, and...

Neandertals hung out in what’s now northern Spain around 430,000 years ago, an analysis of ancient DNA suggests. That’s an earlier Neandertal presence in Europe, by at least 30,000 years, than many researchers had assumed.

Fragments of nuclear DNA from a tooth and partial leg bone discovered at Sima de los Huesos, a chamber deep inside a Spanish cave, resemble corresponding parts of a...

Humans and Neandertals may have hooked up much earlier than previously thought.

Early ancestors of humans in Africa interbred with Neandertals about 110,000 years ago, an international group of researchers reports online February 17 in Nature. That genetic mixing left its mark on the DNA of a Siberian Neandertal, the researchers have discovered. While many humans today carry bits of...

Finding Neandertal ancestors in the human family tree was shocking enough when researchers announced it in 2010. Now the implications for modern-day people carrying surviving Neandertal DNA may prove just as stunning.

Today, Europeans and Asians carry, on average, between 1.5 percent and 4 percent Neandertal DNA. A flurry of new studies suggests that the genetic hand-me-downs may once...

“Beauty and the Beast” is practically “a tale as old as time.” So are a few other folktales, new research shows.

Statistical ties between a set of folktales and languages from parts of Europe and Asia have helped researchers date the origins of some stories to thousands of years ago. The roots of the oldest one — a folktale called “The Smith and the Devil” — stretch back to the Bronze...